Pan-American announces new album

Following his excellent 2025 collaboration alongside Michael Grigoni, New World, Lonely Ride (which featured Sun 13’s Top 50 Albums of the year), Mark Nelson’s Pan-American is set to return with new album, Fly The Ocean In A Silver Plane.

Set for release on March 20 via kranky, earlier today, Nelson shared two songs, Death Cleaning and Taxi to the Terminal, which you can listen to below.

Offering his thoughts on Fly The Ocean In A Silver Plane, Nelson says, “Having experienced the arrival of my children, the decline and departure of my parents, and the many years of venturing out and returning home in my own life, travel feels like the perfect tropology to consider the mysteries we inhabit.”

“The music on this record is a reflection of journeys and travel. The real-world kind and the metaphorical ones as well. Having experienced the arrival of my children, the decline and departure of my parents, and the many years of venturing out and returning home in my own life, travel feels like the perfect tropology to consider the mysteries we inhabit. Travel and its impressions, rituals, superstitions – the possibilities and risk – all open up onto the landscape of our biggest questions, fear and wonder.”

Nelson also explains the two songs that inspired the record.

“The first one, and the source of the title is You Belong to Me by Jo Stafford. Colonial overtones unmissable to our modern ears aside, It’s also a beautiful mid-century romance-and an ode to the threat of a shrinking world. The song represents the loneliness and the mystery of being alone and left behind. The singer is not asking their loved one to shut down horizons, merely reminding them to return when the traveling is done. To set aside The Silver Plane of transition, change and the in-between for the intimacy of solid earth.

“The second song is Promised Land by Chuck Berry. Also about a journey and another one that moves easily between allegory and narrative. The singer is on the move across segregated America trying to get to the promised land of California. The song is both a tall tale that evokes Mark Twain, and an American epic that can keep good company with Herman Melville. When the hero finally makes it to California, his first instinct is to call home and reassure the Old World that he’s safely arrived in the new one.”

Lonely Planet: In Conversation with Michael Grigoni & Pan-American’s Mark Nelson

Recorded in Nelson’s home over the last couple years with electric guitar, rubber bridge acoustic guitar, Ableton Live and an Electron Digitone synth, the album also features Chelsea Bridge’s Mallory Linnehan on violin and vocals. “We recorded those performances on a summer afternoon in Chicago at the Not Not space with the windows open,” says Nelson.